3. Are You Paying Premium Prices for Ordinary Technology?
“Always focus on the educational purpose, not on the technology.”
— Keith Krueger, Consortium for School Networking
Nonprofits may debate one staff position for months while renewing costly software contracts with little discussion. Community platforms, strategic-planning systems, learning portals, dashboards, and member databases can quietly consume the equivalent of a salary.
Subscription software now represents more than 81 percent of the nonprofit software market, which means recurring payments have become the default rather than a decision organizations revisit regularly.
Enterprise software may be appropriate, but it should not be automatic. A self-hosted platform built with WordPress, MemberPress, BuddyBoss, BuddyPress, or similar tools may provide memberships, courses, discussions, resource libraries, and payments without locking the organization into rising annual fees.
Self-hosting is not free. It requires maintenance, backups, security, and technical support. The comparison should be based on total cost and actual value, not the assumption that an expensive platform is automatically safer or better.
One Thing to Do
Review every technology contract costing more than $5,000 annually. Evaluate each one against revenue generated, staff time saved, member use, data portability, and switching cost. Require an alternative proposal before renewing any product that performs poorly in two or more categories.
